#superbacteria

Captan por primera vez en vídeo el preciso instante en el que una bacteria se convierte en superbacteria 

It’s frustrating enough when progress in medicine plods along slowly, but downright alarming when it starts to backslide. Bacterial infections were considered essentially conquered in the 20th century, and now resistant strains are projected to kill more people than cancer by 2050.

While some people dispute the projected death rate, it’s agreed that bacteria are evolving resistance to antibiotics faster than the drug pipeline can produce new ones.

But in the battle between mankind and microbes, our side has a few new tactics. Some scientists are finding new, more precise strategies for adding to our antibiotic arsenal. Others are finding ways to slow down the relentless evolution of resistant bacteria. One lab, with new results published last week, is combining those tactics.

Bacteria have been evolving for more than 3 billion years, so they have pretty good arsenals of their own. They can evolve with ferocious speed using tricks to increase their genetic diversity, and some can communicate and cooperate. Evolutionary biologists who work on the resistance problem say it will take more to hold them back than simply avoiding unnecessary or inappropriate prescriptions.

In an opinion piece published last December in the journal PLOS Biology, evolutionary biologist Sam Brown of Georgia Institute of Technology advocated a hard push to find alternative ways to treat the most common bacterial ailments – urinary tract and bronchial infections and strep throat. Scientists are already scrambling to come up with alternative ways to treat the sorts of life-threatening infections people get in hospitals, he said, but a better long-term strategy for saving lives would be to focus on preventing the evolution of resistant bacteria in the first place, and most of that evolution happens because of those much more common conditions and treatments.

Others have begun to question the longstanding tradition of asking patients to take the whole bottle, often using the drugs for days after they feel better. As several evolutionary biologists have pointed out, if a few resistant bugs remain after the patient feels better, then taking more of the same drug won’t wipe them out. As this piece in the medical website STAT News points out, the current medical wisdom isn’t based on testing but became accepted before resistance had become recognized as a threat.

It might turn out that letting the immune system wipe out any stragglers would better prevent the breeding of resistant strains. If another new study is right, then continuing antibiotics after recovery may dampen the effectiveness of the immune system, thus giving any resistant strains that do crop up the chance to flourish.

In that study, MIT medical engineer James Collins and colleagues used the basic antibiotic ciprofloxacin on lab mice, and made a detailed analysis of how the drug affected the metabolism of the mouse cells. What the researchers found was that the drug affected many activities of the mouse cells in counterproductive ways – favoring the spread of the bacteria. “It’s a relationship that’s been largely overlooked,” said Collins. In building up our antibiotic arsenal, he said, it would help for prescribers and patients to know, for example, that antibiotics can inhibit the immune system.

The ability to keep the immune system in high gear might come out of the sort of precision work being done at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. There, biologist Nassos Typas and colleagues pitted a few strains of multi-drug-resistant bacteria against 3,000 combinations – antibiotics paired with each other, or with other drugs or food additives.

The findings, published July 4 in the journal Nature, included a few surprisingly powerful combinations, including an outdated antibiotic called spectinomycin – developed to treat gonorrhea – combined with the food additive vanillin. The vanillin, which is what gives vanilla its flavor, worked very narrowly, enhancing just one antibiotic’s effect on one strain of E. coli.

Most of the 500 combinations that showed some mutually enhancing effect worked narrowly, said Typas. Many of the drugs that boosted the antibiotic effectiveness against one strain detracted from it against others. That’s potentially a good thing, he said, because it could help target the disease-causing bacteria while avoiding collateral damage to our friendly bacteria – what’s become known as the microbiome.

The billions of bacteria that make up your microbiome help you digest food and perform other tasks, and studies show that antibiotics can disrupt them for at least a year. But worse still, once the organisms of the microbiome become antibiotic resistant, they can pass that on to future infections.

Unlike animals, bacteria have a very efficient way of building their genetic diversity – a process called horizontal gene transfer. There are a number of ways it happens. Sometimes, in an encounter that looks a bit like sex, different bacterial cells connect to each other, but instead of each one combining genes in a new offspring, bacteria can just swap genetic material directly. They don’t have to be from the same species to do this.

So you don’t have to fail to kill an earlier infection in order to breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria in your body. A successful course of antibiotics will also build up genes that confer resistance in your microbiome. And the microbiome can transfer these genes to dangerous, disease-causing bacteria.

That’s why Typas said he was so encouraged that some of those combinations had a powerful killing effect on one strain of bacteria but very little effect against others. That would add to mankind’s arsenal without giving away anything to the microbes.

The post New Weapons Against Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria: Faye Flam appeared first on Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.

In a laboratory in Hong Kong, researchers at a textile company are looking for a special ingredient to improve the company’s production process: bacteria.

The facility is owned by TAL Apparel Ltd., one of the world’s largest cloth manufacturers, with factories in mainland China and Southeast Asia, and the researchers are trying to identify bacteria that can clean up its vast quantities of waste water more efficiently. It’s one of hundreds of efforts by China’s private and state-owned companies to fix a problem that could end up rewriting the playbook of the global fashion industry.

After decades of almost unbridled industrial growth that left China with a legacy of rampant pollution, shrinking aquifers and soaring water prices, the government is cracking down on big industrial users, and the textile industry is in the front line. Cloth-making ranks third in China for the amount of waste water it discharges — 3 billion tons a year — after chemicals and paper, according to a 2015 report by New York-based non-profit group Natural Resources Defense Council, which has an office in Beijing.

The price of ensuring a sustainable water supply in China is yet another expense for factories that are already being squeezed by higher land and labor costs. And while automation and overseas production offer some respite, China’s companies are turning to other technologies to preserve operating margins that, even for major players such as Crystal International Group Ltd., can be less than 10 percent.

In 2015, the government released its Water Ten Plan, ushering in stricter waste-water regulations. It sets out 10 general measures to control pollution discharge, promote technology and strengthen water management, with a 2020 deadline to meet its goals. The stricter water rules are part of China’s actions to increase enforcement in environmental measures. Penalties for environmental violations by the country’s manufacturers rose 34 percent in 2015, from the previous year, according to China Water Risk, a Hong Kong-based non-profit organization focusing on disclosing risks related to China’s water resources.

Fast Fashion

The clean-up goes to the heart of an industry that leveraged decades of cheap labor and capital, and a unique close-knit supply chain of cloth, dyeing, sewing, fasteners, trimmings, labels and logistics, to deliver so-called fast fashion — rapidly shifting style from the catwalk to the mass market at prices that make garments almost a disposable commodity.

“Customers are happy because clothes are even cheaper than a decade ago, and retailers can benefit from low costs,” said Felix Chung, a Hong Kong legislator representing the textile industry. “But the result is massive waste — and the brands will need to pay for it in the future.”

With that model coming under fire for its environmental record, top brands like H&M Hennes & Mauritz AB, Target Corp. and Gap Inc. have adopted water quality standards for their suppliers and monitor them to protect their reputation with consumers. Owners of brands including H&M, Zara, Nike and Adidas are among those that have committed to achieve zero discharge of hazardous chemicals in production by 2020.

The problem is how to achieve better environment and labor standards without raising prices for consumers who have become addicted to cheap fashion.

“We talk about social responsibility, but people are not willing to pay for it,” said TAL’s chairman Harry Lee. “Stricter regulation requires manufacturers to upgrade their facilities. It’s good, but it requires capital.”

Dead Bacteria

TAL, which opened its first factory in mainland China in 1994, had been buying bacteria from other labs to treat water used in washing cloth. Using bacteria instead of chemicals to digest organic compounds can cut the amount of waste sludge generated by as much as 80 percent and enables 100 percent of the water to be recycled in the plant.

During a production halt during the week-long Chinese New Year break this year, the bacteria in its system died, so TAL set up a research team that is using DNA sequencing to find a “superbacteria” that would be cheaper and more efficient, Lee said.

But researching and upgrading technology is expensive. For many smaller suppliers on wafer-thin margins, it’s money they don’t have. In a June-July survey of 85 Chinese textile manufacturers by China Water Risk, more than half those polled said they have invested at least 2 million yuan to upgrade their factories — equivalent to almost 40 percent of the average annual profit for a small textile company in 2012. More than a quarter of the suppliers said the effort had increased operating costs by between 20 percent and 40 percent. Fourteen percent felt they may face the risk of having to shut down.

The day is coming when retailers will have to adjust their retail prices as manufacturers cannot continue to absorb the costs of compliance. “There are clear questions around the long-term business model, especially around potential cost-sharing by brands and consumers,” said Dawn McGregor, a Hong-Kong based manager at China Water Risk. “We’ve already seen manufacturers shutting down and consolidating, which means less choice and higher prices for brands.”

The big retail brands are also playing a part in trying to develop techniques that would cut costs and allow the industry to be less wasteful.

H&M Foundation, a non-profit organization under the Stefan Persson family, founders and main owners of H&M group, announced this September that research with its partner, the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel, had developed a chemical process that could recyle blended textiles into new fabrics and yarns. The foundation offered a 1 million euro award this year to encourage ideas for a more sustainable way to use resources in the fashion industry.

At the TAL lab, scientists hope to develop their superbacteria within two years. If they succeed, TAL will share the results with other manufacturers, Lee said.

“Hopefully more factories will be willing to use it,” said Lee, “But it’s a very slow process.”

The post Superbacteria Could Soon Be Eating China’s Industrial Waste appeared first on Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.

Detectaron superbacteria de malaria en Asia

Asia.- Según fuentes científicas de salud, la superbacteria de una de las variedades más inclementes de malaria y de gran resistencia a los fármacos, que se ha afianzado en las localidades del Sudeste de Asia, intimidando los esfuerzos para fiscalizar y erradicar la enfermedad en todo el mundo.

Según reseñó el portal web de EFE, el parásito plasmodium falciparum, con focal resistencia a la…

Scientists have found dangerous drug-resistant "super bacteria" off beaches in Rio de Janeiro that will host Olympic swimming events and in a lagoon where rowing and canoe athletes will compete when the Games start on Aug. 5.

The findings from two unpublished academic studies seen by Reuters concern Rio's most popular spots for tourists and greatly increase the areas known to be infected by the microbes normally found only in hospitals.

They also heighten concerns that Rio's sewage-infested waterways are unsafe.

ZIKA. Super bacteria .. political strife.